A Psychosocial Approach to Shame, Embarrassment & Melancholia
amongst Unemployed Young Men and their Fathers
Luis Jimenez & Valerie Walkerdine
School of Social Sciences
Cardiff University
Abstract:
This paper uses a psychosocial approach to explore young unemployed
men’s resistance to work they describe as ‘embarrassing’ and ‘feminine,
in the context of the closure of a steelworks in a town in the South Wales
valleys. In doing this, it also responds to Kenway’s et al study (2006) of
rural unemployed men which claims that melancholia is a key cultural
norm mediating fathers and sons responses to unemployment whilst
preventing both to engage with the demands of current available work.
In our interview based study, with young men as well as their mothers
and (where possible) their fathers, we found a community riven with
complex feelings about masculinity and femininity, projected onto the
young men in such a way as to almost scapegoat them. The presence of
melancholic responses is also present in our study but is not so strong as
to be depicted as a “cultural norm” for all these men –as Kenway et al
suggest. Instead, the experience of the young men is marked by
embarrassment and shame and they feel bullied and shamed by their
families, peers and others in the community for not being able to find
gender-appropriate work. The implications of these findings for
understandings of youth male unemployment and education are
considered.
Introduction
This paper seeks to explore discussions about melancholy as the main
way of coping with unemployment amongst rural men in raised by
Kenway, Kraac and Hickey-Moody (2006) in the light of research
carried out by the authors in south Wales. Kenway et al’s discussion of
melancholy is very interesting, focussing as it does on an attempt to
understand the persistence of dispositions associated with manual work
among men in locations where that work has disappeared. Our own
research took place in a town in the south Wales valleys, which had lost
its major employer, a steel works, in 2002. This closure had a devastating
effect upon the small town and while many young and older men
managed to make the transition to other forms of work some did not. In
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particular, some young unemployed men refused to take available work
because it was considered embarrassing and feminine. Consequently, we
received funding to follow this up and conducted a small psychosocial
interview-based study of six young unemployed men (17-24) and their
parents with the aim of further understanding the phenomenon we had
encountered. Kenway et al’s idea of melancholy was very suggestive, but
what we found was that their idea while suggestive was over-general. In
this paper therefore we set out some of the issues that arose in our
analysis of the interview data in an attempt to make more complex and
specific the issues of what happens psychosocially in such circumstances.
For the young men and families we worked with, there was a great deal
of pain and difficulty around this issue, with the problem well recognised
by other members of the community. For example, stacking shelves in
the local supermarket was considered too embarrassing to contemplate.
These are young men who left school with no qualifications and therefore
for whom no ‘skilled’ work is available. The range of unskilled work is
very limited, but we were struck by the fact that the young men in our
first study would rather go without work than take the embarrassing
work. This was of great concern in an area with 39% youth male
unemployment (Nomis, 2008) and in which heavy industry was almost
non existent. Our interview data indicated a level of distress that needed
to be understood. The experience of the young men is marked by shame,
and they feel bullied and shamed by their families, peers and others in the
community for not being able to find gender-appropriate work. By
contrast, in Kenway et al’s study - on men and masculinities beyond
metropolitan areas coping with the effects of de-industrialisation- rural
men are depicted as engaged in forms of emotional intensity grounded
and even haunted by loss of cross generational heavy manufacturing
manly work, entwined with melancholia and nostalgia, affecting
intergenerational relationships between working class males. Such
engagement with loss, combined with current increasing casual, poorly
paid and insecure work are seen as producing both forms of “protest
masculinities” and “melancholic masculinities.” The latter is
characterised by internalisation, on behalf of the young men of the angst
of their fathers with an intergenerational sense of loyalty to them,
resulting in their inability to engage with the demands of the new labour
market. This also involves a melancholic discourse of loss and defeat that
flows into pessimistic views and sentiments about the present and future
of work, their maleness and their working class communities. These
melancholic responses are also said to have become a cultural male norm
in itself within communities that have lost their manufacturing base.
The main thesis in Kenway’s work is that these men are stuck in the past
with unresolved feelings of loss and sidelined in the present with no other
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options or referents they can look to in order to further grasp, articulate
and refashion for themselves how they feel about these massive job losses
and related work and social changes. While Kenway et al’s thesis is
interesting, the position they take is very general, as though all men feel
this way and her idea is rather speculative, based on some small interview
examples and references or popular cultural representations. They do
recognise that some fathers actually don’t want their sons to follow in
their own footsteps because they realise how difficult it would be for their
sons to insist on working on some manufacturing industries which are
dying. Our research touches on the very same issues and what we aim to
do in this paper is to show how the general ideas of Kenway et al need to
be developed and made more detailed and complex.
Whilst we agree with these researchers on the need to further empirically
and theoretically understand the emotional legacy and the economic and
cultural dimensions of such global labour market and associated gender
order changes, at the same time, we think there is the need for a more
nuanced understanding of the issues than that presented by Kenway and
we further suggest that this can be reached through a more complex
psychosocial understanding of the issues involved.
Method:
The method we used was psychosocial research. The aim of psychosocial
research is to explore the affective lives of participants by means of a
narrative interview method (Stopford, 2004, Walkerdine 2002 ), which
uses the interview dialogue to gently explore affective themes and a
narrative associated with the decision not to take on embarrassing or
feminine work. This is a dialogue which develops through the use of
three one hour interviews in which the rapport between interviewer and
participants is built up over time, allowing the possibility for the
development of a sense of safety. This is supplemented by two
interviews with the mothers and fathers of the young men, using the same
format.
We carried out three psychosocial interviews (1 hour each) with a sample
of six young unemployed men (ages 17-24) from one town in the South
Wales valleys. This town lost its major employer, a steelworks, in 2002.
We explored both their experiences of employment/unemployment and
their relationships with their parents. We also carried out two
psychosocial interviews with the parents (mothers and where possible
fathers) of these young men, in order to explore similar issues and the
impact of the parenting roles on the attitudes to work and study of their
sons. All interviews were conducted by the first author.
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Shame in Young Men’s Relationships with their Fathers and their
Attitudes to Service Work:
One of the key aspects of both the young men’s and parents’ discourse
was shame. The ways in which shame permeates many aspects of men’s
lives (e.g., the relationships between fathers and sons) is quite a rich and
complex emotional aspect of masculinity (Seidler, 2007) For the purposes
of this discussion, we simply want to highlight and explore some
relational aspects of the importance of shame and self-esteem in the
parenting relationship, with particular attention to the way in which
shame is created, expressed and managed both for the parent and for the
child. In relation to this, we also explore some normative aspects of
parental shame and its relation to both unemployment and available yet
rejected feminised work. We also briefly touch upon the reciprocal
relationship between parent’s and children's shame, and ways in which
the management of the shame of the father seem (in emotional terms) to
serve a safeguarding function in relation to the self-esteem of both
parent and child.
As such, shame is ideally suited to explore the context of male
responses to male unemployment, which in various ways represent
forms of symbolic competition fueled by the perception of social threat
and the need to ‘prove oneself’ in the eyes of one’s peers. Where guilt
tends to involve an appraisal of one’s actions, shame entails an appraisal
of one’s entire self, making it an important motivational tool. Another
important feature of shame, is that it can trigger other emotional defenses
such as embarrassment, denial, silence and other behaviours, including
anger and isolation. In a relational sense, a response to the awareness of
shame may thus entail further shame based reactions, (e.g., ashamed to
be ashamed’) or fear (ashamed to ‘look like a coward’ in front of one’s
peers).
In this section, we explore some aspects of the production of shame
within the father-son dynamic as revealed in our interviews with them.
Some young men experienced direct family rejection and shame when
they engaged in “feminine” work. Often these young men ended up with
those jobs in order to secure the approval and the affection of their
parents and to avoid further stigmatisation and ridicule on behalf of other
males in their community (e.g. both young local male peers as well as
male friends of their fathers). A first example comes from Tony, 24 who
is already a father of three children and who has neither school nor work
credentials. He tells Luis about his difficult experiences with his step
father when he took on a pizza delivery and a cleaning job:
… I was once a delivery driver for Dominos Pizza. I don’t know whether
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you seen the uniform you got to wear cream trousers, a red t-shirt, a
baseball cap a bum bag and things like that and he (his stepfather) found
that, well embarrassing. Urm you have to wear the full outfit you had a
Dominos Pizza belt, and everything,.. If I was out doing a delivery, and
he spotted me, he would purposely make out he didn’t see me like, not be
seen talking to me basically because of what I was wearing and what I
was doing like.. I then offered my brothers a lift home in the car and
they all refused to get in the car with me and said, you look like an idiot
basically, you know, what the hell are you wearing? You look a fool
looking like that, and that was the attitude they had, they wouldn’t get a
lift home with me like, because of what I had to wear... They used to
laugh all the time and they never once went to the shop as long as I
worked there. I don’t know whether it was embarrassment or what they
never showed their face at the shop, never once. Everybody, not just my
father and my brothers but my mother too, they all used to laugh when I
would go up in what I had to wear, that uniform, and my friends also
used to laugh at me… My mother did say to me once, you know they are
all taking the mickey out of your stepfather because of what you are
doing, so basically get a proper job, my mother was basically saying… If
I went to his house, like he'd go, you know, he'd go to the pub or
something, you know he would go out to the pub every time I went there
for a couple of weeks, as if he was physically embarrassed about, you
know, too embarrassed to talk to his own son like or to be seen with me,
and then I had to quit that job, and once I did that then he was back to
normal, you know he'd stay and he would talk to me again and he'd say
like come to the pub with us…
In these reflections, Tony shows clear awareness of the embarrassment
felt by his stepfather, his family, and his father’s friends when he had to
wear a uniform to work.
The fact that Tony also had to leave that pizza delivery job in order to
avoid being ridiculed and rejected by his family and friends gives a sense
of the incredible difficulties faced by both father and son and the
emotional and social difficulties this causes between them. Thus Tony is
caught between his relationship with his stepfather and the peer pressure
and bullying from male and female workmates. Tony reflects on these
experiences:
Yeah, once I was working as a cleaner on the factory floor and you know
I had to walk past with a bin or perhaps a mop and bucket and you know
they (female colleagues) would start talking to each other and laughing
at me and things like that like, you know. Yeah, it was quite embarrassing
for a boy; you know to be laughed at by a bunch of girls.
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Luis:
So can you remember, what did you say to those girls? How did you
handle that?
Tony:
Well you know, I asked them what was so funny like and they were saying
Mrs Mop and things like that and calling me names and you know, so
well like I say basically round here it is classed as a woman’s job being a
cleaner and things like that, they class it strictly as a woman’s job. There
is a lot of boys I know the same as myself now that wouldn’t apply for
that kind of job again, and I know a lot of friends who wouldn’t even
think about applying for that kind of job, but at the end of the day it was
all that was going on, and I had to bring in money for my family and I
took it, but you know, three weeks I stuck it out for and I couldn’t take no
more. I was going home and feeling depressed you know because people
were laughing at me and aggravating me all day for eight hours.
In these reflections Tony also shows how feelings about traditional
masculine work are not simply confined to men. The women also
contribute to reproducing a divided shaming gender order to which the
young men are forced to conform in order to avoid being the target of
humiliating jokes and ridicule. Later on, Tony recalls other similar
incidents that some of his male friends had to face whilst working in the
checkout in their local supermarket:
… I’ve got friends and if they see a boy working on the checkout in the
local supermarket they kind of like call him all the sort of things, call him
names and bully him. Like call him a woman and things like that and say
you are doing a woman’s job, you know. It is not a mans work it is a
woman’s job like, that is the way they see that kind of job, a woman’s job
like. They bully them and aggravate them. I know people who have and
they tend to call them like gay and things like that you know and to some
people it hurts being called that like. You know they call them a gay and
mammy’s boy working on the till and you know, there are a lot of things
that they do say and a lot of it is using bad language like and not so polite
words…
In this further reflection, Tony gave us another insight into how local
men try to sustain the boundaries of the male heterosexual self by
defensively constructing other local males working in service jobs as
“gay” “woman” or “mammy’s boy”. Indeed, within male heterosexual
6
peer dynamics, epithets such as “gay” “woman” or “mammy’s boy” are
amongst the most commonly dreaded insults for many heterosexual men.
This can be seen when Tony mentioned that it hurts to be called gay and
that he is well aware that many men dread and avoid becoming the target
of such hurtful shaming name-calling. This is because the content of the
bullying allegedly
reflects an apparent unmanliness that further
disqualifies them vis a vis other men. In other words, in order for those
discourses to be effective in their ridiculing function, those who receive
them need also to share a set of gendered discourses and significations in
order to believe and conform to their insulting/degrading connotations
and effects. In this sense, the fear of “feminisation” in the workplace also
centres on the seemingly “heterosexist” idea that by working in physical
proximity to female colleagues there will be a point where they will
become demasculinised and stop being men and therefore become
something else, e.g., a woman or a gay man. As mentioned earlier, this
fear of feminisation because of working in female concentrated
occupations might also seem unlikely and disproportionate, given the
current evidence shown in research showing how most men entering
into feminine occupations very often re-signify in masculine terms the
work they do in order to further preserve their privileges as men and to
maintain a hierarchic position vis a vis female work colleagues. ( Cross &
Bagilhole, 2002; Hall, Hockney & Robinson, 2007; Lupton, 2006,
Nordberg 20002,)
Within the interview context, Luis was struggling to understand why
Tony simply conformed to his stepfather’s embarrassment and rejection
and whether he felt he could stand up for himself in front of his family
and peers and prioritise his own decisions his family and his children.
When he asked Tony why he still needed the approval of his father when
deciding what job to take, he replied:
I think it's because like I've always been his, like his closest son, really to
be honest, I'm closer to him than the rest of my brothers and that's why
like he wants me to do it and not my other brothers because me and my
dad have always been really close and I think that's why he's sort of like
picking on me to then follow him in his footsteps sort of thing and learn a
trade like he has, and become a business man in that kind of way but,
like I said yesterday, I'm not sure if that's what I want to do at the
moment. I would rather make my own decisions, do what I want to do,
not what others and my parents want me to do. I think instead of being
against what I want to do, they should support me really in what I want to
do.
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Tony seemed also to be qualifying and distinguishing the particular
closeness he had with his stepfather as a way to rationalise his
embarrassment and rejection of his son when he saw him being publicly
humiliated wearing a pizza uniform in the workplace as well as the
consequent frustration of realising that his son is not following in his
footsteps. Yet, at the same time, he did not seem to be fully aware of the
emotional costs for himself of conforming to being the “closest and
preferred son” of his stepfather. This is a complex (but not uncommon)
father/son relationship and one hypothesis is that perhaps Tony
unconsciously experienced the attitude of his stepfather as also conveying
a sense of over protectiveness and control over his own life and work
decisions - in the name of the affection and predilection his stepfather has
for him as the preferred stepson. Tony’s main content of his conflictive
feelings did not appear to involve a burdened sense of inherited
melancholic oppositional attitude towards service work per se, neither
did he actually appear to believe that because he has had to work as a
cleaner or pizza delivery boy that this automatically transformed him into
an essentially other, unmanly, hopeless loser incapable of unlearning and
differentiating himself from the conflicts of his own stepfather. Instead,
what seemed to unconsciously keep him unnecessarily tied and
subordinated to the bullying and rejection of his stepfather was perhaps a
frustrating sense of impotence at trying to achieving the opposite, that is,
mostly a sense that he needed to unlearn and to distance himself from
what appeared to him as the sexist, narrow minded and bullying
unconscious aspects implicit in his stepfather’s attitude to men doing
“feminine” work. Thus, what seemed for us to be troubling Tony was the
realisation that although he could be critical of his father, at the same
time, he could not, at the moment, avoid being isolated from his parental
family and by implication being isolated and ridiculed as an improper
man or a loser by his local peers . Therefore he still felt frustrated and
resigned to conform to his stepfather in order to avoid feeling rejected by
him and his family. In this way, Tony’s conflicted situation seemed to
get reinforced by the realisation that, on the one hand, he needed his
stepfather emotionally but at the same time he was slowly realising the
cost of inhabiting/ conforming to being the preferred son of his father.
Additionally, although there might some slight melancholic tone in the
father’s reactions to Tony, this does not suggest to us that what mediates
Tony’s relation to his father is a simple father son unconscious
melancholic transmission of unbearable loss of masculinity, which would
then render Tony being incapable of engaging in work because
unconsciously he would have to carry on re-enacting this loss in his daily
life, as Kenway et al have suggested. Rather, we think that, primarily, the
influence of Tony’s stepfather is one that basically ensures that he
8
conforms to an upholding of the feared lost hard manual working form of
heterosexual masculinity, which sustained these men and their
community through the history of the steelworks.
This father son situation is also very relevant for our understanding of the
ways in which some parents, especially chronically unemployed ones,
tend to re-enact and reinforce their own painful experiences of living
under benefits and chronic unemployment in their relations with their
young sons. These enactments and distresses about the difficulties of
living as parents under benefits with little aspirations and job prospects
carry implicitly specific male gendered meanings in relation to the
relative value of work, education and its associations with maleness and
in this sense also shape in various ways the attitudes, values, feelings (e.g.
shame, embarrassment) and expectations that these young sons internalise
and use in their reflections, choices and decisions when they consider
their work options and life projects.
Another example comes from one of the fathers, Andy, 46 years old,
married with two teenage children and who has been chronically
unemployed (for the past 16 years) and on benefits (like his wife). He
told Luis about his last job 16 years ago and how he thinks he got to
where he is at this moment in his life and the implications of his chronic
unemployment on his children:
… My father was in the steelworks and he was made redundant in ’77, I
think, just after my mother died. He had to finish then because we was
little, you know what I mean, and there was no one else to look after us.
So, , they made him redundant because, he had to look after us because
we was all children at the time…. And he always said to us the
steelworks, was a job for life…
I started off with a government training scheme and they took me on fulltime. And then, the Council wanted the youngsters again below us, they
took them on and pay them less. They was paying them £ 19.50 a week,
and rather than pay me a tidy wage, they’d rather take youngsters on…
That’s how it was and as I said, I haven’t done a lot since. I’ve had one
or two factory jobs, , which I didn’t like, well, they was twelve-hour shifts,
you know, the night shifts and god knows what, and it just weren’t for me
like. I didn’t like the council policy and I just came out and, in a way, I
did regret it, because I didn’t get back into full-time employment… I got
to be honest with you, it’s about 16 years, I’ve been unemployed and I
haven’t done a lot since because, well, there is not a lot out here
anyway. I just think I’m 46 now, and I think to myself, um, I got no hope,
you know what I mean. Like my boy, he’s 16, he’s out of school already.
He’s also struggling to find work. What hope have I got, you know what I
9
mean?…My partner, she’s claiming disability allowance. She’s diabetic
and she suffers with arthritis. So, I’m down as a carer for her…
In these reflections Andy seemed to be re-telling his own preferred story
as to why he has not worked for such a long time. This gives a further
context to understand his disappointment with government, unfair
policies on employment and how this has meant that both himself and his
own father could not continue working because of circumstances external
to their own control. Although Tony’s reflections did acknowledge the
fact that there has not been manufacturing work in his community for a
long time, it might be over simplistic to understand him as stuck in the
past, feeling melancholic all the time about the loss of manufacturing
work, given that he himself did not have the opportunity to do so in the
first place.
In this context, he could not even be able to feel
melancholic about a working past he did not have the opportunity to
experience himself fully in the first place. However, that does not mean
that the employment situation and loss of the steelworks did not have its
own complex role to play in his feelings. Perhaps his feelings of
hopelessness for his own working future, combined with his wary good
wishes for his son, showed some of the ways in which he coped with
unemployment and the associated shame and despair that he, like his own
father could no longer provide enough for their own respective families,
rather than simply feeling irresolutely melancholic about the loss of
manufacturing work and the types of masculinities needed to do that type
of work. In this context, we also wondered to what extent the shame and
despair that he could not return to full employment and thus could not
provide enough for his family could then get unconsciously projected
into his own son. When Luis asked him to reflect on this and on the
effects his long term unemployment might have had on his children, he
replied:
I wouldn’t say that it has had an effect on the children, like my son Peter
and my daughter have had no problems, because they grew up with it
[his unemployment] but I know in the past I have provided for them… I
hope I can continue, you know what I mean in the future, but as I said, my
son now he is doing his best, to try and find tidy employment, and we
stand by him in anything that he wants to do, anything whatever he
decides we stand by him, and, I will provide for him as long as my eyes
are open, I will continue to do it…
As we have seen, both in the case of Tony and his father and also in the
case of Andy and his son Peter, the ways in which fathers transmit to
their sons their own difficult feelings of loss and pain and shame that
10
there is no longer manly manufacturing work, get enmeshed in a complex
context of disappointment, lack of hope, despair and grief that then gets
rationalised and projected to their sons as the need of fathers to make sure
their own sons won’t be subject to the same difficult experiences that
their own fathers have experienced after the succession of redundancies
that have taken place over the years in their ex steel community.
Furthermore, the way in which the sons assimilate and think about their
own fathers’ projected feelings of despair are also connected in complex
affective ways with the sons’ own needs to see in their fathers some kind
of idealised strong supportive image that would also serve to consolidate
their own masculinity. In this context, it can be difficult for the sons to
disentangle the extent to which their own difficult struggles in trying to
find jobs and their avoidance of service work already is a reflection of
their own and/or a combined effect of the relationship with their fathers
own difficult past and the associated expectations and values in relation
to what counts as proper manly ways to cope with the massive
unemployment in their community. At the same time, we also need to
consider the extent to which the sons of these men still need to develop
their own critical views as to how they want to approach their work and
future life. We cannot just assume that melancholia is the only framework
that mediates all relationship between fathers and sons (however
melancholic some fathers might feel at some point). Neither can we
simply assume that there is an automatic intergenerational transmission
of melancholic attitudes that just gets unproblematically incorporated
and reproduced in the same way in the lives and aspirations of the young
men. The complexity of relationships between fathers and sons is such
that we also have to consider other psycho-affective and wider social
factors mediating these relationships. We therefore do not just assume
that melancholia is some form of inherited trait that the sons acquire
regardless of their own will and specific situations. For instance, as we
saw in Tony’s case, it has been particularly difficult for him to
disentangle his own situation, -as a stepson who is also at the same time
a father of three children- and how he now needs to also consider his
own parental responsibility to his children. At the same time, Tony also
still sees himself as the preferred son of a stepfather to whom he also
feels he needs to correspond to his love and expectations, e.g., by
conforming to his values and demands. In doing this,
Tony
unconsciously subordinates his own father role vis a vis his own children
in order to carry on ensuring that he will still be the favourite stepson of
his stepfather. This is a key aspect of the psychosocial dimension of the
father son relationships that indirectly also shapes the son’s attitudes to
further education and to available work which is already devalued as
“feminine” and inadequate.
11
In this sense, the reflections of Peter 17 (son of Andy) further illustrate
these complex father-son dynamics:
I wouldn’t do women’s jobs, and I don’t think they’d [his parents] like
me to do that either. Some men don’t mind being on the till, but me, in
particular, didn’t like doing that because I felt it was for women..
although I’d manage to do that sort of work for short periods, just so I
can get some cash to help with my daily expenses.
Like Peter, other young men also thought that obtaining jobs that are
socially considered manly (e.g. the armed forces, manufacturing work)
was still important to their sense of proper manliness and in their
priorities when they seek for available work. (Lyndsay & McQuaid
2004). Nevertheless we also found that young men do not only comply
with these cultural demands on their identities as males, since they are
also perfectly capable of contemplating doing service work (even if it is
for short periods). This also shows how young men are capable of self
reflection and how they can prioritise their own thinking when they
consider their job and study options, -regardless of the prescriptions and
expectations of parents and local manly culture.
We might wonder what aspects of service work the young men see
specifically as feminine and why. When he asked Alan (17 years old),
about this, he replied:
That’s a good question. I don’t know. But, you wouldn’t see, well, you
mostly see women doing that job in [local supermarket], now, in’t it? It’s
just like, oh, I can’t think of the word now…uhm, o yeah like a
stereotype… So, when someone says, like look at that shelf stacker, you
stereotype someone and you think, oh, yeah, he’s going to be like a gay
person, kind of thing… Until you see them and talk, if you talk to them,
it’s totally different then, if you talk to them. They might be really, really
tough or hard and it’s how people think at the end of the day.
Alan was aware of the difference between stereotyping someone and then
how by listening to the person you can get a completely different
impression. However, his reflections implicitly acknowledged how he
can do both, e.g. stereotyping and then listening to someone and realising
people are often not a mere stereotype. As mentioned earlier, this is part
of a complex emotional arrangement between young men with their
fathers, whereby both fathers and sons incorporate cultural restrictions
and idealised expectations on male subjectivity (Marsiglio, et at, 1997,
2005). This is often achieved through incorporation of aspects deemed
as ideal for men ( often a sense of assertive confident, stoic non
12
vulnerability, combined with unconscious normative splitting off
(Layton, 2002) any other aspects of male identity that culture deems as
inappropriate for men, e.g. a temporal straightforward repudiation of and
distancing from aspects that are associated with femininity -which can
then be later reconsidered in more complex ways. This is illustrated in
Alan’s reflections that he would not mind doing service work as it would
also give him some income which he urgently needed. In this sense, both
fathers and sons comply to a considerable extent with such cultural
demands in order to be recognised as a properly manly, classed subject
(Frosh et al, 2002). However as the above examples of subjection and
passive resistance to paternal authority show, in practice these norms and
demands are also often more complex and dynamic , e.g., these are both
incorporated and resisted through relational repetition compulsions (e.g.
the unconscious seemingly compulsive exposure to situations reminiscent
of earlier complex –and often traumatic- emotional experiences which
have not been fully assimilated emotionally in order to gain some control
over its frustrating effects on conscious life) which in themselves express
the simultaneous conformity, resistance and collusion with the local
moral male gender order where these men live(Balsam 2007, Jay 2007,
Salamon, 2007) .
Conclusions:
As our data shows, a key aspect of the psychosocial gendered
production of the embarrassment, pain and shame that many ex steel men
and their sons still experience is, in various ways, is still closely related
to a complex past legacy of trying to cope with the loss of steel and
other local manufacturing. Consequently, the difficulties that we now see
amongst the young men is also to some extent, a reflection of how these
young men see their fathers’ own difficult experiences of unemployment
and the associated shame and despair at the painful realisation that their
proud manly hard labour masculinities are no longer needed in the
emerging context of the new service sector work. This also suggests that
the emotional cost of coping with the loss of manufacturing also involves
a social trauma (Hopper, 2003), which gets re-enacted in the relationships
between fathers and sons through the production of male shame and
embarrassment and with it, other related effects associated with long
term unemployment such as chronic stress and related chronic illnesses
for the ex steel workers (Beatty, et al 2003). This painful situation then
creates considerable anxiety and shame which is then projected unto
these young men. Therefore, it is in this context that the community turns
on its most vulnerable, as these young men are the ones who could not
get out because they had no qualifications and so they are the most
13
vulnerable in terms of unemployment and in terms of their vulnerability
to this shaming experience. As mentioned earlier, Kenway sees these
intergenerational dynamics between fathers and sons as being
fundamentally mediated by the melancholic attitudes of the fathers and
their inability to unlearn the attitudes associated with regular skilled
manual work, with the sons apparently simply incorporating these
melancholic anxieties and reproducing them in their own lives in a
uniform way. Kenway et also claim that the fathers simply become
“melancholic figures” (e.g., unreflectively living in the past and sidelined
in the present), and that this is a cultural norm for all these men. By
contrast, we argue that whilst there might be some temporary
melancholic reactions on the part of the fathers, these are not persistent
and fixed, neither do they simply get transmitted automatically to the
sons. The evidence that Kenway et al provide to explain how young men
incorporate and reproduce the melancholia of their fathers is in the
“hopes and views on education” that the young men display, (e.g., how
many young men do not want to do “head work” –going to school- and
prefer instead to work “hands on” –using machinery- and how they see
school as just being sitting “doing nothing” either at school or in an
office. By contrast, within our data we have also seen many young men
saying that they want to leave school soon (often at the age of 16) in
order to start earning money early and they often talk about getting a
trade (e.g., carpentry, plastering, plumbing) which they see as a form of a
job for life. However, our research and that of many others (Epstein et
al, 1998, Murphy & Elwood 1998)) also shows how these working class
men have traditionally left school early (at 16) and how their sons also do
the same and then they start getting apprenticeships and this is part of
their local work cultures and has happened for many years in coal and
steel communities (way before the emergence of neo liberal work
changes and the rise in service work). Clearly, what Kenway et al are
trying to show is that the young men cannot give up this kind of manual
work even after it has gone, being unable to stay on at school or go into
‘head work’. While there is ample evidence in our data that indeed these
particular unemployed young men are suffering from the complex
relationship to the masculinity of their fathers and their fathers’
generation that we have outlined, this by no means describes all young
men in the town, some of whom have been willing to change. Likewise,
within our work with community workers who also try to help young men
get an education and jobs, we have also seen how young men often
prefer to attend community meetings where they want to play musical
instruments and have a pleasant time but they would not want to go back
to school because often they see this as not that relevant to their own
interests and abilities. This of course is a key challenge to educators and
14
policy makers and this is something that Kenway et al acknowledge, e.g.
how many young men (rural and urban) also have other abilities that they
use to critically learn from their everyday cultural context (e.g., what they
call “haptic tacticians” and “cool cartographers”) and how their reflexive
self construction is also depending on these situational, temporal and
spatial references and abilities and do not simply depend on a school
curriculum. These examples further reinforce our view that we need to
pay more detailed attention to how men have also other referents and
abilities to make sense of their current circumstances and that in order to
try to understand what support they need, we also need to think about
more effective educational interventions. For example, the discussion of
our data have shown instead, how even amongst those fathers who are
chronically unemployed and/or ill do not necessarily become melancholic
figures stuck in the past irresolutely, and then the sons simply
“inheriting” these melancholic traits automatically. Rather, we have
shown how, despite all these difficulties, these fathers and sons are also
eventually able to critically reflect and mobilise their melancholic and
other feelings of loss, and, even sometimes clinical depression, and even
if they still remain unemployed and ill, they can nonetheless also make
efforts to not simply impose their own unresolved grief onto their sons.
This is not meant to suggest that the presence of melancholic elements is
absent or irrelevant in men’s responses to redundancies and lack of jobs.
Rather we simply wanted to show how we cannot demonstrate that
melancholia is neither a cultural norm for all these men nor that it affects
all fathers and sons in the same way.
A recognition of this long complex legacy of a sense of lost proud
manufacturing work and manhood is important if we try to understand
and contribute to find ways of helping the young men who are now
needing to dress up in demeaning uniforms in order to survive in the
new labour market. This further reinforces the need to consider what
trauma does to subjectivity, that is, looking psychosocially at the way in
which both social male gendered norms are incorporated (through
normative unconscious splitting up of unwanted aspects of desirable
masculinity) in combination with an appreciation of the effect of
traumatic experiences of loss of manufacturing work in the conscious
and unconscious lives of working class men. This suggests a desperate
attempt at preserving a form of working class heterosexuality which
seems to them to be of in threat of disappearing or being replaced by
other masculinities that are not suitable or desirable for these men. In this
sense the rejection of feminine work and any other attribute that is seen as
feminine also suggests that embodying this form of maleness can also be
experienced as gender trauma involving a compromise formation. This
is a compromise between voice and experience, language and behaviour
15
e.g. how the so called “laddishness” that these men perform in front of
each other can also be seen as an attempt to preserve self worth and
thereby limit the scope for a gradual development of less defensive and
narrow forms of masculinity.
In this sense, it could be argued that it is absolutely necessary to further
understand and work with this complex and painful dynamic if
regeneration practices are to have any effects in getting young men like
these into work. This involves working with the effects of traumatic loss
by acknowledging its effects for masculinities, -including the loss not
only of manufacturing but also the loss of male self esteem, certainty,
physical power, group charisma, and the rights and privileges associated
with specific stages of the lifecycle. Only then would it be more feasible
to overcome the depressive anxieties that many of these men still
experience and to start re-evaluating and re-moralising what has been
lost with a more realistic approach. This in turn also involves developing
a sense of hope and confidence- in order to integrate into the male self
other aspects of their masculinity that are less defensive and exclusive.
Thus, while we support Kenway et al’s overall attempt to understand
something about the transmission of affect from one generation to
another, we have tried to outline the central importance for policy and
practice of understanding this in a more complex and nuanced way.
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